Saturday, June 09, 2012

Theda Skocpol explains why the 2012 presidential election is set to be "one of the most important elections in American history"

What is at stake in the 2012 US presidential election? Actually, the stakes are dramatically high–and no, that's not overheated campaign rhetoric. If anyone needs a wake-up call about this, I recommend reading a recent interview with Theda Skocpol in Juncture, the journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain. Skocpol explains why this is
shaping up to be "one of the most important elections in American
history"; in fact, she argues, it could well be "a turning-point
election," one way or another.

Her argument strikes me as cogent and convincing. And that's true despite the fact that, in my view, Skocpol addresses only some
of the reasons why a Republican victory in November would not only be disastrous
in the short run, but would also help to consolidate and reinforce some
of the most dangerous, undemocratic, and generally pernicious long-term
tendencies in American society and politics.

The interview is not that long, and worth reading in full. For a start, here are some highlights, including Juncture's introductory mini-bio.

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S Thomas professor of government and sociology at Harvard University and one of the US’s leading public intellectuals. Her work is breathtaking in its range, covering comparative politics (States and Social Revolutions, 1979), US social policy (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992) and studies of democratic culture (Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, 2003). She is a self-confessed ‘New Deal Democrat’ and continues to work tirelessly to achieve progressive change, most recently by setting up a Scholars Strategy Network for left-leaning academics to promote and inform debate. Her latest book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2011), has been described as ‘the definitive study of the Tea Party’. Juncture met Professor Skocpol at the Kennedy School in Boston.

[....]

Juncture: How will history judge the first Obama presidency? A missed opportunity, or did he face constraints so strong that he achieved what he could?

Theda Skocpol: We have to talk about Obama and the Democratic party in Congress – they arrived together and that’s what created a chance to change direction in American public policy. I think that they accomplished quite a lot given the enormity of the simultaneous crises they were facing – first the financial crash and then the recession that engulfed Main Street. You can certainly argue that Obama was caught in the trap of trying to save the financial system and did not explain to Americans sufficiently well the need for a bold recovery policy, and he didn’t focus perhaps enough on job creation. But he did get through, with the aid of the Democrats in Congress, a stimulus programme that saved the US economy and probably the world economy from a plunge into a great depression. He saved the American automobile industry, which has really turned out to be quite a triumph and very important to the social and economic fabric of the midwestern states.

He and the Democrats also fashioned an historic and important healthcare reform. It is hugely complicated and yet another one of these things where you send the Congress people off to reach a 1,400-page deal that nobody can understand. And people will make fun of Obama if the Supreme Court – the five right-wing ideologues on the Supreme Court – turns the Affordable Care Act into ashes. But I think that they did a gargantuan job in getting it through in the face of extreme obstruction. They have faced a level of obstruction from the ‘out party’ – the Republicans – that has not existed in American politics since the era before the civil war.

Could Obama have been bolder? Partly yes and partly no. The 2008 campaign was unusually bold for an American Democrat – Obama spoke about the need to raise taxes on the rich and he has never flinched from that. That does not sound like much – it actually isn’t much, given the historic increases in wealth and income inequalities in the US – but by the standards of the US Democratic party, which has been wimpy in the extreme on these issues, he did articulate important themes which he has stuck to. When his efforts to compromise were spurned for the 100th time, and when they squeaked by in that very radical moment in the summer when a significant group of right-wing Republicans were prepared to not raise the debt ceiling – which would have had catastrophic consequences – he began to articulate a clearer contrast with the Republicans. I think he is going to stick with that through to the election, as he gives up on his earlier efforts at bipartisanship. This coming election is going to be one of the most clear on issues of socioeconomic inequality and distribution and taxes of any that we have had in the US in a long time.

J:Lots has been written about the impact of the Tea Party on the Republican primaries, but looking further ahead, what will be the ongoing impact of the Tea Party on US politics?

TS: Well the Republican Presidential candidates, including Mitt Romney, who will be the nominee, have all explicitly endorsed both grassroots and elite Tea Party priorities. Getting rid of healthcare reform, or at least eviscerating it if they can’t get the lot off the books; cracking down on immigration: illegal immigrants who are here as well as those who might enter; cutting taxes further on the very wealthy, and privatising social security and Medicare – these have all been signed up to. They are breathtakingly radical stands. If Romney is elected he will probably be there with a Republican majority in both the Senate and the House and in the first three months he will sign bills that destroy healthcare reform, push privatisation of social security and Medicare, and cut taxes. In many ways he is the ideal Tea Party candidate – electable, but someone who will deliver their agenda.

If Obama wins, clearly it’ll be different. [....] So I expect Tea Party forces, if not necessarily the label, to continue to play a role, but that role will be quite different depending on whether it is a Republican who is elected or Obama.

J:Thinkers like Ruy Teixeira have written about how demographic trends, such as a younger and more diverse electorate, could favour the Democrats. Does this mean that the Tea Party should be understood as a kind of rightwing ‘death rattle’ and that whoever wins the 2012 election, the future is bright for progressive politics?

TS: This is a potentially dangerous way of looking at it. I am not a social or economic determinist of any kind. I don’t believe that economic forces have only one possible political expression. Nor do I believe that demography is destiny in any simple sense. It’s true that at this moment the Republican coalition is old and white; Mitt Romney, if he loses, will lose because he cannot fashion much of an appeal to the Latinos he’s been routinely bashing during the primaries. (I suspect he’ll try to make a wealthy conservative Cuban – Marco Rubio – his running mate, but I don’t think that’ll be enough.)

But let’s just keep in mind that policy watersheds shape politics as well as the other way around. So if healthcare reform survives and if it provides a modicum of health security for lower income people and new regulatory protections to middle class people, then that, along with the survival of even a slightly trimmed-back Medicare and social security, will cement the Democratic party’s appeal to the broader middle class. It will allow a transition to incorporating younger people and a more racially diverse electorate to blow winds into a centre-left Democratic party.

But there are forces on the right who understand that they are close to their last chance – to use an American football analogy, it’s in the final two minutes and they have got to get that ball down the field and score a touchdown. They understand the importance of this election much better than the befuddled people on my side. They understand that if they can destroy or eviscerate healthcare reform, if they can change social security and Medicare for future generations (they will grandfather and grandmother the Tea Partiers, but they want to change them for people 55 and younger) then they can turn afterwards to making an appeal to the growing Latino population and to the younger generation around somewhat more free-market principles.

After this election they’ll have to change – they’ll have to give up some of their ‘dead-endism’ over their opposition to gay marriage for example. Republican elites already understand that. But by winning they could very well buy themselves five to 10 years to make this shift, because they’ll be associated with whatever economic recovery occurs and they will have destroyed policies that could have built political identities and coalitions which they understand would have been a threat.

So this is a turning-point election – this is one of the most important elections in American history coming up, not because Obama is some world-striding superman but because he has slightly turned the direction of the nation and the Democratic party, and if his turn is overturned at a critical juncture there may not come another opportunity for a while, and by then the identities and the interests may not be exactly the same. I think the 2012 election is going to be one of the most riveting, most hard-fought no-holds-barred elections in US political history – and that says something.

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About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research.. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and is currently a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)